Real World Problems Solved by Enterprise Integration

We spoke to 20 executives in 16 companies to get their perspective on how enterprise integration was adding value to the enterprise.

Here’s who we spoke to:

Adam Fingerman, Chief Experience Officer, ArcTouch | Jon Gelsey, CEO, Auth0 | Nishant Patel, CTO, and Matthew Baier, COO, Built.io |Tyson Whitten, API Management Product Marketing, CA Technologies | Andrew Warfield, CTO and Co-Founder, Coho Data | Zeev Avidan, V.P. Product Management, OpenLegacy | Mike Han, V.P. Operations, Liferay | Uri Sarid, CTO, Conor Curlett, Principal Architect, MuleSoft | Gabe Stanek, Director of Field Engineering, Neo Technology | Florent Solt, CTO, Netvibes | Sean Bowen, CEO, Push Technology | Jon Bock, Vice President Products, Snowflake Computing | James Jinnette, Director of Information Technology, unidentified CRO | Suchit Bachalli, President, Unilog |Asanka Abeysinghe, V.P. Solutions Architecture, WSO2 |  Phil Manfredi, Aaron Sandeen and Kiran Chinnagangannagari, Co-Founders, Zuggand |

The greatest value of enterprise integration is being seen in two areas: 1) legacy data able to be accessed to solve business problems; and, 2) using data to improve the customer and the employee experience.

Here are the thoughts of our respondent on how they see enterprise integration is adding value today:

1. Divisibility. No need to throw away data. Keep the data and add an integration layer so the data can be processed. Business can now be connected across domains - interdomain connectivity. Proper integration internally and externally provides tremendous value to the organization.
2. Improve value to the customer by reducing the time and cost to get a new product to market. Integrations matter because they make a difference in people’s lives.
3. Enterprises have information. We help them know how to get the information and use it correctly for synergy within the organization. We build something to leverage what’s already there.
4. Data mashup and orchestration. We can place organizations and solutions in integration platforms as a service with APIs. We take all of the information and data and work with the business side to identify the business value. Opening the data up to others enables people to create more solutions (e.g. Xbox Kinect is now being used by surgeons during surgery). Enterprise architecture enables others to create solutions on top of what you, and others, have created. This openness and enablement fosters innovation and collaboration in areas you haven’t thought about.
5. Enterprise integration used to mean backend; however, now it’s much broader. IT has to integrate all applications - including the Apple Watch. Backend + mobile + IoT + wearables. Having the same cloud integration platform is making it easier. Cloud integration businesses are trying to be nimble. Enterprise integration is a great opportunity for IT to add value to the business.
6. Unlocking the data. “Who was in this movie?" people go to IMDB to find the answer instantly versus “What were sales in this geography in second quarter” takes hours. Enterprise integration transforms business with Uber style business models. We can enable a field sales team with online sales materials that are always current, integrated with the CRM, and available offline.
7. Make it easy for developers to set up secure authentication and authorization for the applications and APIs they’re building. Security is often overlooked. Enterprise integration provides an opportunity to improve the security of enterprise data assets.
8. Ability to build services to scale to multiple users and sizes. Netflix approach to integration is a model for scaling without a huge IT headache. Get data to where it’s useful in a timely way. Have the sbility to pull performance data from around the world.
9. Existing architecture has siloed information. Chief Digital Officer helps gain access seamlessly and securely. Mobility is all about Restful interfaces providing information to developers so they can build apps to meet consumer needs. Ecommerce platforms are able to offload information, as needed, to the cloud, deliver a great experience on mobile while APIs facilitate integration.
10. Enable the company to aggregate all information, add intelligence and act on the information. Media communications and marketing companies from the inside and outside need a tool to understand and see trends. Business intelligence tools act through the products to reach others and improve the network. Add more value to social listening, more ways to reach and report. Able to reach someone via mobile, outside of traditional business hours, who can then respond or take action.
11. Enabling enterprises to co-locate owning some hardware but outsourcing large analytics that can be used in spot instances to do burst capacity in a leased cloud environment.
12. More folks want to leverage enterprise data to improve the customer experience as well as the employee experience. How users are interacting with systems and enterprise data (e.g. CRM, order history). Be able to predict what customers are asking for - proactive versus reactive.
13. All customers have a digital strategy. If it’s not mobile data going out it’s IoT data coming in.
14. Improving the customer experience by letting the customer know what’s available now, what it will cost and how soon they can get it.
15. Creating new ecosystems that reach new groups in an enterprise and then partnering with external companies. It’s an API economy - build on other people’s offerings. New capabilities put APIs in everything. Fox Sports in Australia instrumented its entire chain of digital media and are feeding it back into an artificial intelligence engine and continuously tweaking to optimize revenue. Wells Fargo is using beacon technology for its own innovation while also using it to provide value for its larger customers.
16. Doors are opened for engineers to enter and adopt technology for seamless integration of systems. These are tremendous changes, thanks to open source, that give all customers the opportunity to look at just the right tool for the right job.

Where are you seeing the greatest value being added with enterprise integration?